Less protein, more fat?


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #21

Welcome to the forums! A week is not very long to be eating a well-formulated ketogenic diet. Give it some time before giving up. And remember that, while keto is touted as a weight-loss diet, is would more accurately be described as a weight-normalization diet. If you don’t have all that much fat to shed, it will take longer. The dramatic stories are from people who had lots of weight to lose, and even they slowed down toward the end.

Once you get into ketosis, your body’s priorities may be different from yours. It may believe that metabolic health is more important than burning off those extra pounds. It may believe that you need more muscle mass, in which case it will add it, sometimes even at the same time as it burns off extra fat. That will confuse your scale, even as your clothes get looser.

If you give your body enough energy, it is more likely to ramp up your metabolism and burn off its extra fat stores. Otherwise, it will think there’s a famine and will take measures to cope. So give it plenty of calories. So you can’t give it carbohydrate, or it will turn the glucose into fat and store it. You can’t give it too much protein, or toxic ammonia might build up in your blood. What you can give it is fat. Fat won’t stimulate insulin production, so in the absence of carbohydrate your body has no reason to hang onto its excess fat.

If you want to increase your consumption of healthy fat, start cooking with butter, tallow, lard, ghee, bacon fat, and coconut oil. (Save the olive oil for your salad—it’s smoke point is too low for really safe cooking. Avoid all seed oils; most of them have unhealthy levels of omega-six fatty acids.) Buy fatty cuts of meat, and don’t buy chicken with the skin removed. Look for fattier birds, such as goose and duck. Eat organ meats, especially liver, which is delicious when not overcooked. Oxtail has a lot of fat, as well. A pork shoulder (picnic, it’s often called) is delicious and comes with a layer of fat—it’s self-basting! Eating saturated fat will actually lower your LDL, not raise it.


#22

I finally tried this with the mascarpone last night for the first time since reading your post, and my question is how you avoid eating the entire package of mascarpone. LOL Not really, but I could have, I definitely ended up eating more than 3 tbsp! It was very, very good.


(LeeAnn Brooks) #23

I only scoop out the 3 tablespoons and mix it up.

Haven’t had issues over eating it like I do peanut butter, but even if you do, there’s no carbs.


#24

I looked through all the brands of mascarpone at my Whole Foods, and most had 2 carbs per tbsp, I ended up buying the one with 1.3 carbs per tbsp. I probably ate about 6-8 tbsp and it wasn’t my only carb source for the day. Where do you get yours?


(LeeAnn Brooks) #25